Family Values

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Family values refers to those norms that emerge from our experiences within the family structure and that inform our understanding of that social construction we call the family. Just as family structures have changed over time and vary across cultures, so too have attitudes about the family, its relationship to society, and its relative value in the social order. These changes within the family and society often have occasioned fierce debate and have led to contested claims about the nature and definition of family and those values that represent the many and varied forms of family life.

In the late-twentieth-century United States, political conservatives and liberals battled for culturally accepted definitions of the family and family values. According to sociologist James Davison Hunter, “the family is the most conspicuous field of conflict in the culture war” (1991, p. 176). This battle was an extension of a campaign by the Moral Majority, an organization formed in 1979 and composed of conservative, evangelical Christian activists. Among its stated tenets was opposition to feminism, gay rights, abortion, and pornography. The Moral Majority championed the patriarchal nuclear family as a biblical ideal and warned that the failure of the family would lead to the demise of American culture.

Family values as an ideological battleground came to prominence in U.S. political debate during the 1992 presidential campaign, when particular values were espoused by the “New Right,” a movement that brought together religious and political conservatives who emphasized individual responsibility and the primacy of Christian moral values coupled with traditional gender roles. One powerful New Right group, Focus on the Family, claims, for example, that the church, the family, and the government are the three basic institutions ordained by God for the benefit of humanity. The traditional family as described by such conservatives presumes heterosexual marriage, patriarchal authority within the family, and the production and care of children. The term “family values” was adopted by the New Right and functions in public debate as shorthand for this conservative ideology of family. “Family values” proponents often carve out their position over and against social forces which they believe threaten the traditional family; they are antichoice (in regards to abortion), antigay, against sex education other than promotion of strict abstinence, against hate-crime legislation, against the separation of church and state, and against a host of other issues that they believe threaten the traditional family structure.

History tells us that rather than privileging the nuclear family, definitions of the family have changed with time and culture, as have the values attributed to family. In classical Greek culture, for example, the paterfamilias (the male head of a household) was responsible not only for his immediate family but also for his current slaves, former slaves who were now clients, hired laborers, and sometimes business associates or tenants. And even in the ancient world there were disagreements about the value of the family: The philosopher Aristotle thought that family life was an obligation one fulfilled for the good of society, whereas Plato argued in The Republic that private, individual families detracted from the social good.

Historian Stephanie Coontz notes in The Social Origins of Private Life (1988) that the model of the nuclear family idealized in contemporary conservative politics emerged in the United States after the Revolutionary War as a response to changing economic and political realities. The Industrial Revolution provided new sources of income, facilitating the growth of a middle class. The wives of this emergent class were expected to devote themselves to the domestic sphere; their most important political contribution was to raise patriotic children while men worked outside the home to support the family and society. This was, of course, a privileged ideal that was not realized in, for example, slave families. Even today, poor and working-class families continue to find it difficult to thrive outside of extended kinship networks that provide both financial and emotional support. With an increasingly diverse U.S. population, traditional “family values” fail to account for the variety of family structures that emerge from different ethnic and cultural backgrounds.

Despite conservative claims that traditional “family values” are divinely ordained and hold the key to the ideal society, recent social science research indicates that values are of secondary importance when it comes to social mobility as an indicator of success. In a longitudinal study Patrick L. Mason assessed the importance of family values and class status on interracial inequality and intergenerational mobility (1999). Mason found that although family values do have some effect on economic mobility from one generation to the next, class considerations (and the intersection of these with race) are more significant in predicting inequality. Put another way, although values may shape our perception of our place in society, material considerations have a greater influence on our ability to actually change that place.

Any contemporary attempt to define “family values” must take into account the multiple and varying forms in which family life takes place in diverse communities, including single-parent families, unmarried heterosexual couples with or without children, gay men and lesbians with or without children, and other nontraditional groupings who form “families of choice.” The family is a cultural construction that has undergone multiple transformations throughout history without being destroyed. Despite “family values” rhetoric to the contrary, the family will survive future transformations, opening new horizons of human affiliation and identity.

SEE ALSO Family; Family, Extended; Family, Nuclear; Religion

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Abbott, Pamela, and Claire Wallace. 1992. The Family and the New Right. London: Pluto Press.

Coontz, Stephanie. 1988. The Social Origins of Private Life: A History of American Families, 1600–1900. New York: Verso Press.

Hunter, James Davison. 1991. Culture Wars: The Struggle to Define America. New York: Basic Books.

Marty, Martin E., and R. Scott Appleby, eds. 1993. Fundamentalisms and Society: Reclaiming the Sciences, the Family, and Education. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Mason, Patrick L. 1999. Family Environment and Intergenerational Well-Being: Some Preliminary Results. In The State of Black America 1999. Washington, DC: National Urban League.

Okin, Susan Moller. 1989. Justice, Gender, and the Family. New York: Basic Books.

Elizabeth A. Say